Mind Prey

away.”
    “That’s interesting,” Mail said cheerfully. “I mean, that’s very interesting. I best do as much fuckin’ as I can, then, because I might not get any more for a while. Have to do with those hairy old assholes out at Stillwater.”
    “Be your asshole,” Lucas snarled.
    Mail’s voice went cold: “Oh, I don’t think so. I don’t think so, Lucas.”
    “What?” Lucas asked. “You got a magic spell?”
    “Nothing like that,” Mail said. “But after people get to know me, they don’t fuck with me; and that’s the truth. But hey, gotta go.”
    “Wait a minute,” Lucas said. “Are you taking care of those people? You’ve got them for now, and that puts some responsibility on you.”
    Mail hesitated, then said, “I don’t have time to talk. But yeah, I’m taking care of them. Sometimes she makes me angry, but I don’t know: subconsciously, she likes me. She always did, but she repressed it. She has a guilt complex about our doctor-patient relationship, but she used to sit there…”
    He paused again, then said, “I’ve got to go.”
    Given a different context, he might have sounded almost human, Lucas thought, as the phone went click. As it was, he simply sounded insane.
     
    “F IRE,” L UCAS SAID to Black and Sherrill. “Sex. Probably he’s been institutionalized—he talks about Stillwater like…I don’t know. He doesn’t really know about it, but he’s heard a lot about it.”
    Lester came in. “He called from out in Woodbury somewhere.”
    “Woodbury. That’s 494,” Lucas said. “The guy’s riding up and down the 494 strip, so he’s someplace south.”
    “Yeah. We’ve whittled it down to one-point-two million people.”
    “The fire and sex thing,” Sherrill said. “We got one just like that.”
    “Yeah.” Black thumbed through a stack of paper. “This guy. John Mail. Let me see, he was fourteen when she saw him…Huh. He’d be about twenty-five right now.”
    Lucas looked at Lester. “That’d be pretty good. That’d be about prime time for a psycho.”
    Lester tappedthefile. “Let’s isolate that one and get on it.”
     
    L UCAS LOOKED AT his watch: almost two o’clock. Nearly forty-eight hours since the kidnapping. He locked the door to his office, closed the blinds, pulled the curtains, put his feet back on his desk, and thought about it. And the more he thought about it, the more the telephone link seemed the best immediate possibility.
    He closed his eyes and visualized a map of the metro area. All right: if they coordinated cops from all over the metro area—if they set everything up in advance—how far down could they push the reaction time? A minute? Forty-five seconds? Even less than that, if they got lucky. And if they caught him in a shopping center, someplace with restricted access, only a couple of exits—if they did that, they should be able to seal the place before he could get the car out. They could process every plate in the lot, check every ID…
    Lucas was putting the idea together when another thought occurred: what had Dunn said? That he talked to Andi in her car? So Andi Manette had a cellular phone? What kind? A purse phone, or a dedicated car phone?
    He sat up, turned on the desk light, rang Black’s desk, got no answer, tried Sherrill, no answer. Got Anderson’s daily book, flipped through it, found Dunn’s phone number and dialed.
    A cop answered. “He’s probably on his car phone, chief.”
    Lucas got the number and called, and Dunn answered.
    “Does your wife have a cellular?”
    “Sure.”
    “A car phone, or a personal phone?”
    “She carries it in her purse,” Dunn said.

12
    T HE FBI ’S AGENT-IN-CHARGE had a cleft chin and blond hair; his name was T. Conrad Haward, and he thought he looked like a Yale footballer, just now easing into his prime. But he had large, fuzzy ears and behind his back was called Dumbo.
    Lucas, Lester, and an anonymous FBI tech sat in Haward’s office underlooking the Minneapolis skyline. Haward interlaced his fingers in the middle of his leatherette desk pad and said, “It’s all on the way, with the techs to operate it. The Chicago flight lands in an hour; the LA flight is still three hours out. The Dallas stuff, I don’t know if we’ll get that tonight. We’ll go ahead in any case. Time is too much of a problem. In sixty-five percent of the cases, the victims have been terminated at this point on the time line.”
    “I just hope he’s got that fucking phone,”